"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."-- Douglas Adams

Saturday, May 04, 2019

The Intruder (2019)

I do occasionally worry if spoilers are warranted for a movie. How much information is necessary for you to get an idea of what the movie is about? How much do I have to give away to talk about important plot points? In the case of The Intruder, the trailer took care of that for me. If you’ve seen it, you know basically what the movie is about: Charlie Peck sells a house to Annie and Scott Russell. Only Charlie doesn’t exactly walk away. All that’s left to fill in are Charlie’s motivation and fate.

Well, ok. There’s a little more to it than that, but not much. There is a very paint-by-numbers feel to the movie. It’s like [Character A] and [Party B] conduct transaction. [Character A] has [Issue]. Everything that Charlie does is setting up for some sort of repercussion. Charlie’s supposedly going to stay with a daughter? You know that’s not happening. Charlie is staying at a hotel? Maybe. And when I say maybe, I mean not really.

The movie does do well to turn up the suspense at a consistent rate. Charlie starts out as a friendly, albeit creepy, man. When Scott meets one of his new neighbors, they get to talking about good old Charlie. The neighbor is basically, “Oh, yeah. That guy.” There’s a little more to Charlie than we are initially told about, but we know that from the beginning. It’s just a matter of when and how that information will come out.

I did a little reading. It turns out that the writer, David Loughery, was also the guy who wrote Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. For those even vaguely familiar with Star Trek movies, the odd-numbered films were notorious for being of lower quality. This must have been an odd-numbered suspense movie. It had a very generic, bland feel to it.

I will say that I’d like to see what Simon Pegg could have done with the script. This is the guy that wrote Paul and Hot Fuzz. I definitely think he could have made this a better movie. (Granted, that’s like saying you could make water taste better, but still…) The movie had so much potential. Instead, it came across more like a basic template for suspense movies.